Hope & Love Spring Eternal

I’ve written before about the birds in my suburban yard. Frankly, as the summer wears on without much chance of an exotic vacation (hell, right now, lunch in San Francisco sounds like an exotic vacation), it’s likely that I’ll be spending more and more time appreciating what’s quite literally in my own backyard. Which takes me to another of my favorite backyard birds, the oh-how-common-of-a-name-can-you-possibly-get House Finch.

Like Starlings and equally blah-named House Sparrows, the House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) is a new import to the United States. But while the first two species have fallen into general disfavor among bird people (in both cases largely due to really aggressive behaviors around our native birds), the House Finch’s jaunty disposition, cheery song, and (for the males) red cap, vest and tush have so far at least earned him a better loved spot.

Although Carolyn and I can’t be sure of it, it does seem like the same one guy who is busy entertaining us most days. You’re looking at, you know, a Finch as common as Houses, a bitty-sized bird common enough to have earned his name for being as ubiquitous as buildings. But love, as we all know, does strange things, and his courtship behaviors are frankly — if one can just get past daydreaming of the Galapagos Islands and photo safaris to Tanzania — about as remarkable as anything one finds in nature.

We usually hear him before we see him, a chipper song of “HEY, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME! PRETTY TERRIFIC, RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW!” Okay, so it’s tweets and chirps, but the universal translator would clearly express this as a song of himself, bright and loud, without any doubt self-impressed as the most amazing few inches of bird on the planet.

He’s always there, atop the redwood fence just by the seed feeder. Somehow, he manages to fold his body into a capital V, head and tail both pointing away from each other and up towards the sky. He’s crazily hopping up and down and back and forth, as animated as something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And his song-and-dance routine continues to the, sadly, barely tolerant glare of a never ending stream of apparently underwhelmed females.

“WAIT, WAIT, IT’S ME. AND YOU MUST WANT SOME OF ME! ME!! ME!!!” he calls. It’s at this point that Carolyn often makes some cutting remark about men and singles bars, the human equivalent I suppose of the seed-filled plastic tube which attracts his series of first dates. (It’s ok, really. We’ve been married a long time.)

This performance goes on for two, five, sometimes as long as ten minutes. Inevitably the target of his attention just flies off leaving a lonely and disappointed — no, I have to assume shocked — winged lothario standing on the fence, surrounded by Goldfinches and Jays completely disinterested in the whole thing. At times Carolyn and I turn away, feeling that he might somehow be embarrassed that this whole thing was witnessed by a couple of laughing bipeds. But often within minutes, he’s back at it, another finchy femme in his sights. Hope and love do indeed spring eternal, at least here in my backyard.